How safe is it to ride an e-scooter in Edmonton?
E-scooters injuries sent about 760 people to Edmonton hospitals from 2019 to 2021: study
The trees are budding, flowers are blooming, the geese are back: it's e-scooter season in Edmonton.
But just how safe is it to ride one in Edmonton?
A recently published study looked at how many people visited an emergency room in Edmonton for e-scooter injuries, over summers of 2019 to 2021. It found nearly 760 cases.
Dr. Brian Rowe, who was part of the study and is an emergency room physician at the University of Alberta Hospital, said he wanted to see if the anecdotal rise in e-scooter injuries he was seeing could be backed up with data.
"One in eight is a head injury," Rowe told CBC News.
"We need to continue to publicize the fact that riding a bike, an e-bike, an e-scooter has the potential to leave you with lifelong injuries to your head — and the simplest preventive strategy is to wear a helmet."
The median age of those injured was 28 years old, the study found. Men and women were almost equally represented in patients.
About three in five patients suffered multiple injuries, with fractures (32 per cent) and head injuries (17 per cent) being the most common, the study found.
Few people (two per cent) wore helmets and roughly one-quarter of those injured had ridden while under the influence of substances, the study says.
Adam Zarycki has injured himself on e-scooters more than once. His first wipeout resulted in, what the doctor described as, a "catastrophic" ankle sprain, he said.
It happened after he'd been drinking, Zarycki said, and he hasn't ridden an e-scooter after having alcohol since.
His second injury happened after an anti-theft mechanism kicked in on the scooter while he rode south of Whyte Avenue, he said.
"It sent me over the handlebars. And unfortunately, my fall was bad enough that I bruised the femur on my right leg," Zarycki said.
The numbers from the study are not at all surprising for Zarycki. He said he knows a few clients from his work on Whyte Avenue who have suffered bad injuries from e-scooters, particular near the High Level Bridge.
"The walkways, the roadways get a little tighter. Definitely some crashes and bad injuries, for sure," he said.
Zarycki has kept riding, though. He said now he travels a little slower and tries to be considerate of others using the road.
He urged people to not ride with overconfidence.
"You see a lot of folks zipping around cars, ignoring stop signs, areas where there aren't any restrictions on the scooter's use. Scooter users tend to disregard pedestrians and then they end up crashing and/or injuring somebody else," he said.
Coun. Andrew Knack, who was a proponent of getting e-scooters to come to Edmonton, said the necessary safety infrastructure is there, but people need to be more safe in their behaviour.
"[E-scooters] can cause injuries and we want people to be safe on them, but it's ultimately their choice of how safe they want to be," Knack said.
"I cannot recommend enough that everyone — doesn't matter your age — should be putting on a helmet, should be taking those turns safely, should be ringing the bell when you're passing somebody."
For Rowe, the emergency room doctor, a solution lies in more public education, and potential legislation on helmet use.
"Some people don't like it because it's government interference, but it's actually about health," he said.
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